Colorado secession drive mirrors national politics

Commentary: Minority wants to be freed of the will of majority

Several counties in northeast Colorado want to break away from Denver’s tyranny and form a new state.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The silly season in politics is clearly here as news media spotlight a drive by several counties to secede from Colorado and form a new state.

With political dysfunction widespread across the country, the spunky effort by 10 northern Colorado counties to make themselves heard through an improbable secession initiative serves as a poster child for the dialogue of the deaf among our politicians.

“We need to figure out way to re-enfranchise the people who feel politically disenfranchised now and ignored,” Weld County Commissioner Sean Conway told CBS News last month in defending the effort.

Weld has been one of the leaders in putting the initiative on the ballot and Conway has become something of a spokesman for the secessionists. He feels the counties, where much of Colorado’s unconventional oil and gas is found, have some leverage.

“Eighty percent of the oil and gas revenue in the state of Colorado is coming out of northeastern Colorado,” Conway told the CBS reporter. “I’m telling you, we are economic drivers.”

The last time secession surfaced nationally was when Texas Gov. Rick Perry intimated in 2009 that his state might have to consider secession if the federal government didn’t pay more attention to its concerns. (The Supreme Court, by the way, ruled in 1869 that Texas, contrary to popular belief, does not have the right to secede.)

As recently as last year, after President Barack Obama won re-election, hundreds of thousands of citizens from numerous states petitioned to secede from the Union, prompting a gentle rebuke from the White House.

The founding fathers, White House aide Jon Carson said in January in rejecting the petitions, provided for “the right to change our national government through the power of the ballot.” But, he added, “They did not provide a right to walk away from it.”

The Colorado counties are luckier, because they can secede from the state if residents vote for it and both the state Legislature and the U.S. Congress approve and allow the formation of a 51st state.

That, of course, is not likely to happen. The last state to successfully break off was West Virginia in 1863, after the federal government encouraged it to secede from Virginia, which itself, of course, was trying to secede from the United States.

No one really expects a new state to emerge in Colorado, any more than anyone really expected Texas to secede from the Union.

But as a protest, the county initiatives in Colorado may be more than an empty gesture. It is an effort to block the tyranny of the majority that the nation’s founding fathers did in fact seek to mitigate with the checks and balances in the Constitution.

The immediate catalyst for the Colorado initiative was a measure passed this year by the Democratic-dominated state Legislature to double the requirement for renewable generation in rural electricity co-ops, but the underlying issues range from fracking to gun control.

The protesters in Weld and the other counties feel that the majority in the state house in Denver is pushing an urban agenda and leaving them out.

Other “secession” efforts — such as the 2002 effort by San Fernando Valley to secede from Los Angeles — have in fact produced results and won political concessions for those who feel ignored.

The light-hearted debate on Colorado secession and the issues it raises have given political commentators the chance to show off a fanciful map by urban planner Neil Freeman, which reconfigures the country into 50 states of roughly equal population of about 6 million each.

It is a map, explains Freeman, which honors the one man-one vote principle, making the Electoral College more representative of the popular will. His playful names for the new states, generally referring to geographic features and preferring American Indian names, gives us states like Adirondack, Casco, Pocono, Ogallala, and so on.

This is not a serious proposal, either. But it does highlight the serious problem of how political majorities and minorities must figure out a way to make democracy work.

As aggrieved as northern Coloradoans may feel, can they imagine what it’s like to be a Democrat in Kansas? If they can flee Denver’s predominant influence, should Democratic Austin be able to secede from Texas because Republican lawmakers control the state Legislature?

The problem is not the geographic configuration or the political institutions, but what we make of them. And that is perhaps the serious lesson to be drawn from silly-season secessionist movements.

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